Read AI Raises $50M to Take Over Your Communications
12:51 Share

Today on the podcast, a fascinating new startup called Read AI has just raised $50 million. Today on the podcast, I'm going to be breaking down what exactly they do, why they've raised $50 million, what their plans are, and why I think this is important for the AI industry in general. So let's get into it. Before we do, I wanted to say, if you haven't already signed up to be on the AI Box waitlist, this is my very own AI no-code

marketplace that I am currently building out. And we're doing an important launch of our first product very shortly. So if you want to get access to this and test out the site, get access to all of the cool features that we're building, go to AI box.ai to get on the wait list. We would love to have you. So getting into the episode, read AI is essentially building what they're calling a summary bot. So to me, this is actually a pretty interesting product.

Not because of, I guess, not because it's like 100% novel what they're doing. We've seen some other players do it, but the way they're doing it and kind of what their vision is and the fact, of course, that they've been able to raise $50 million in a Series B just months after raising their Series A.

So I think what's pretty interesting, this is their series B. The funding round was led by Smash Capital. This is six months after they raised a $21 million series A. And essentially what they're allowing you to do is integrate this kind of AI summary bot, which if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, I'll show you a couple screenshots of what this thing's actually doing and looks like. If not, I'll just explain it. But you're integrating this thing with your email, with Slack, with HubSpot, Jira,

Confluence and a bunch of other products. So essentially you don't have to read big walls of texts. That's essentially what this thing does. And the interesting thing that I'm seeing here is like, yes, it can be integrated into a lot of these tools that people might use, but also they're trying to make this even more useful. And they're releasing a Google Chrome extension.

So it sits on your browser and anywhere that you go on your browser as well, it is summarizing all the texts that you're seeing on your screen, which is kind of nice. So the co-founder David Shim, he was talking to TechCrunch recently. He said that they have seen really strong growth since they did their Series A. They have over 100,000 new accounts created. That's enterprise and individual use. They do have some free tiers. So, you know, heads up that those might not all be paying customers.

And they're really trying to leverage the growth they saw now to get this series. They had to raise this $50 million. And I know how this is. You know, my first startup also had over 100,000 users that were able to use. Now not all of them were paying users. And so I think this is always an important thing because...

They definitely could be losing a lot of money on a bunch of these free users, especially if they are getting access to AI tools that are free. So there is $20 million, not a big deal. Now they raise 50 million. Maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe this thing will be able to grow big enough, fast enough that the free users and the growth will be sustainable. We'll see. In any case, they said, quote, in less than six months, we've doubled our signups, active users and monthly recurring revenue surpassing even our most aggressive projections. We're leveraging this momentum to raise now.

They didn't say what their exact valuation was, but they did say that they got a bump after they essentially did their last round, which, I mean, this makes perfect sense, right? Like if you raise $20 million and you don't see a bump, I think you'd have some serious problems because you obviously have a lot more money to kind of invest into something.

what you're doing. So the thing that they're really trying to focus on is that they say there are co-pilot everywhere. They say 75% of the Fortune 500 companies use read AI to prove productivity. And when they say of the Fortune 500, all this really means is

Um, they take a list of the fortune 500 companies and they look at the emails that have signed up to use their product. And, um, they see if a person from that company. So if one person from JP Morgan Chase is using read, then that gets counted as, you know, one of the, one of the 75 or one of the 500. So in any case, I mean, it is impressive. They're doing cool things, but I'll just say,

They're still at about 100,000 users, so that's nothing insane, in my opinion, in my metrics, just from what I've seen, what I've done. But I'm sure they'll grow. I'm excited. No shade to this company at all. So essentially, they're doing some interesting things. They have email summaries. They have readouts. You might get an email from someone that's super long, and it's going to give you a little summary that just appears at the top of your email, which essentially...

will just be a little blurb at the top of your email. And it's going to tell you, you know, key takeaways, you know, 75% of users found new dashboard layout more intuitive than previous versions got a bunch of bullet points, you know, usability issues, feature requests, performance, next steps. Anyways, they just have a little summary, you don't have to read the whole email, you just read that little summary. What's interesting to me, and we've been joking about this for a long time is just the fact

that people are using AI to write their emails and then people are using AI to like take the AI written email and consolidate it into bullet points. And you just wonder if we should just, I don't know, whatever. So that's funny. Okay. Definitely useful though. If someone sends you a massive email, you don't want to read that whole thing. If you could just read a summary like this, I a hundred percent get the use case here. So something else that's interesting that they're doing is if you have it installed and you're, you know, you're sending someone an email about some sort of thing that

where they're like asking you where it's like you're asking them a question, right? So their example is there's an email that says engineering has confirmed that this will be code complete on the 15th and marketing is set to flip the switch to the site on the first. And then, um, read is actually able to know what's inside of like your, your Google meets and your engineering channel on Slack. And if someone asks you a question, um,

That response I just read to you was generated by read. So beyond just being able to summarize what people are sending to you, it's actually able to get embedded into all of your platforms, right? Into your Google Meets, into your Slack. And if someone asks you a question, it automatically writes a response. So it's the one that said that engineering had confirmed that the code was going to be completed on the 15th. And it's the one that said marketing is going to flip the switch on the site on the first because it was looking at your emails and other...

and other things on other sites. So this is kind of cool to me. You know, if someone asks you a question and you're like, ah, shoot, like when are we launching this campaign? Oh, when are we doing this? And it's just like, it's kind of like on, on Google,

When you're typing a search, it has like the automatic fill of like what it thinks you're going to search for. Even on Gmail, it's actually terrible. And I know they're like, we've been using AI forever because we've been automatically recommending things. Like all it ever recommends for me on Gmail is just like the person's name. Just like starting with that, it automatically types it out. So not super useful. But this is full on answering questions that are in depth and complex about your specific about your specific topic.

thing that they're asking you about into your email. You just click accept or reject with a tab or escape and it's going to respond to your email. So does that save you time? Incredible amounts of time. And I think that's really, really fantastic. As far as who they're, who they integrate with the most, I guess some of the most popular ones are Apple, Zoom, Gmail, Slack, Google Meet, Teams, Salesforce, Jira, Google Docs, Hubspace,

Apple, Replit, all of the Apple, all of the Microsoft kind of software. So this is really interesting. I think this is incredibly useful. And essentially, this is going to go anywhere where you have your collaboration, your productivity, all your note-taking apps, all your workflow tools. And it's just going to be able to read it right there and respond to people. So

Some people have been saying, well, like, why did were they able to raise $50 million? There's a bunch of other people working on this. And to be fair, I think their investors have been really excited about their progress.

Their CEO said, quote, wherever you work, we're pulling in that content and we're giving you summaries. We're giving you recommendations. That's a bigger opportunity, but there's a bigger cost center associated with it. We're focusing on growing that market while maintaining the lead we have on the meeting notes side. Because originally this was just like to help you take meeting notes with AI.

So they're now creating a Chrome extension. Like I mentioned, it's going to sit and it's free and it's going to help you summarize that kind of stuff. So again, when they're offering these free Chrome extensions, they need money. This is why they need to raise the $50 million to keep offering these free options. And they're offering them because, uh, they want to essentially have a solid lead and, uh,

not lose out on opportunities to grow. So they're trading money for users at this point, which is great for growth, but they will at some point need to make sure that it's profitable. So Smash Capital, they're the one that just led this $50 million round.

They think that this is great. They do think that some of these transcription meeting kind of tools are becoming a commodity, but they really like, I think they like read AI's approach of kind of deploying their AI bot everywhere and helping it

do more than just meeting transcription notes. And this is something we see a lot with startups. Like they start in one vertical, they either master it or maybe they don't even get enough users. And so they pivot to something else. They started in a very useful, right? Transcribing meeting notes, but a lot of people are doing that. It's also getting built right into zoom. So it's, you know, at some point when you're commuting with the company, they gotta, they gotta go and do more. And so now we're seeing, I don't know if you call it a pivot, but definitely just adding more features where this thing's actually able to

gather all of your information from all of your different, you know, uh, communication points, sites, et cetera, and then is able to, to create responses. So I'm, I think that's fantastic. I'd be curious to see how good that is, how accurate that is. Um, but yeah, I think this is a great, so they specifically said, quote, we ran into read AI as an assistant, uh,

showing up at meetings and taking notes. But when we sat down with David, we understood a broader vision and concept of having a co-pilot everywhere. This tool can follow you throughout day-to-day tasks, keep a helpful records and allow you to

be a better teammate. This is one thing that I do think is cool about tools like this and the opportunity they have is, and at the end of the day, what this actually turns into is kind of like a, probably a desktop app on your computer that's open and it's running and it like gives you recommendations from the desktop side, kind of what Microsoft's trying to do, to be honest. And the reason I say that is because right now they're being clever by like, if you are in Slack, you could have like the, the

the read AI plugin, theoretically like summarizing stuff in Slack. And when you're on Google Chrome, you can have the Chrome extension, you know, summarizing stuff via the browser, uh,

And it is cool how when you jump between different services, it can like jump around with you. It's the same account, but it's like software, but you do have to install it in all these different places. And so I think for that reason, if they were able to essentially make one central hub, one place, like one app on your desktop that you got to download once and set up once, and it's able to do everything that would be better. And that's essentially the route that Anthropic is taking with their agent tool.

that they've recently come up with this able to like kind of manipulate and control your computer. So I do feel like I see it going more in that direction in the future. But for now, this is cool. This is cool. They currently have 40 employees.

they want to have about 100 people by the end of q1 next year so they got a lot they're doing um they also had some of their previous investors madrona and goldwater capital that invested in this most recent round overall i think this is a fantastic tool really exciting to see what they're able to build with this they have this on ios they have an app for

the app store, which I think is cool, right? Like you got an Apple app, you got a Chrome extension, you're, you're integrated with like plugins on all of this different software. So I think this is cool. And, uh, I, this is actually quite useful, especially because even if you had right, like something to download onto your computer, um,

you still would want something on your phone. So it's cool that it's one account that can go on all of these different platforms and devices. So no matter where you go, it's essentially understanding all of your data from all your communication platforms and being able to help you. So you're never like, oh shoot, I'm away from my computer. I can't answer that question. You might be like out somewhere far. Someone asks you a question. It's pulling from all your databases on your phone. You don't have to go. It's like, you know, way harder to look stuff up on your phone. Half

the time. So you don't have to go dig through all your messages and figure that out. It can just pull it out for you. So I see some massive benefits. I'm excited to see where this technology goes. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave us a rating and review, and I will catch you next time. And go and jump on the waitlist for AIbox.ai to check out my software product I'll be launching shortly.